Reid riffs on Signal, AI for cancer detection, and GPT-4o image generation

0:28I'm Reid Hoffman. about the signal group chat that discussed the bombings of Yemen. And so there are so many questions related to national security, data privacy, data security, having records that will disappear after a week. And so I think there's two separate things here. One is sort of more on the government side and the other is just sort of the future of digital technologies. When we get back to the issue at hand for the government, like, do you think the government should be using signal chats to communicate because it is a method that can be either easily hacked, you invite someone accidentally, the records aren't capped.

1:02Like, where do you see that line? I actually think, generally speaking, using Signal is good. Part of the choice of it is it's one of the most safe and secure and independent, you know, encrypted apps. And unlike a lot of technology, which the government tends to try to RFP, it's live and constant and upgrading and so, you know, safe and secure from, you know, for example, Russian hacking. Now, Signal is designed for individuals, not for groups. So it doesn't have all the features like a Microsoft Teams would have, which is, you know, making sure that anyone you're including is in your organization, et cetera.

1:35Because, you know, Signal is that freedom of the individual in a way. So it doesn't stop you from doing what I presume is user error and including the editor-in-chief of a prominent magazine on your thread where you're detailing your war plans and perhaps even most comedically saying, I don't know, OPSEC is good. You're like, OPSEC for people who don't know is operational security, which means you're protecting yourself from intrusion and spying. actually you've invited the journalist in. And, you know, so that's just more, you know, Department of Government incompetence kind of activity. But I actually think generally speaking, using signal is good.

2:14It just will take, you know, people who are not being incompetent. Right. So let's talk about another sort of technology story that's been in the news. There's been a lot of buzz recently because a London National Health Service hospital, they claim to be the first in the world to use AI to perform instant skin cancer checks. And so they fed photos of moles into their app. And the hospital had a 75 % reduction in clinical time, and they still had a near perfect diagnostic record. I mean, this is sort of the future of medicine that we're so excited about. What do you think are going to be the biggest barriers to leveraging AI as a diagnostic tool?

2:51Like, we have this amazing story. How do we scale this? So, I mean, just even to elaborate that story, I mean, imagine that all this stuff is coming to a smartphone near you, that the camera will be used for this. And there already is apps and applications for doing part to that. And I think that part of where we will see an amazing revolution in human health and the elevation of humanity. And so I think that's a whole range of things that are there that are, for example, advice from, you know, Pi or ChatGVT or Copilot, you know, Gemini to you to doctor amplification. You know, today, if you had a an AI or a radiologist reading your film, you'd rather have both.

3:32And then, you know, this app, which is, you know, running on an iPhone can bring all kinds of diagnostics. I mean, just think of it as, okay, you've got mole particular characteristics, but also mention rashes or, you know, or skin tone. You know, you can imagine sensors where we begin to go, like, here's your breathe on it sensors. Most medical conditions, cancer is an obvious example of it. But the earlier that you get to it, the earlier that you understand it and can do something about it, the much better your health outcomes are. And so just imagine all of that being brought to you by, and then of course the moonshots of like curing cancer, therapeutics, and obviously Madness, which I'm doing with Sudhartha Mukherjee, you know, our moonshot target part of that video we did is like, in addition to like sending men to the moon, we can tackle big things like cancer.

4:21I think this is small in years by which we start getting more and more amazing results. Yeah, I have to admit, I'm really bullish on the technology. The thing I do worry about is, I don't want to say government getting in the way, but like I was at a GP appointment last week and I got a notice and it said, hey, your doctor wants to record the visit. They're going to feed the data into Microsoft and use Microsoft Azure and Copilot and we're going to improve health outcomes. I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I'm so excited. And then the next line was something like, oh, by the way, if you sign this, PIPA no longer applies to you and you don't own your data and it could go anywhere.

5:00And I was like, oh, OK, it seems like we need a new regulatory framework, which is something between I want my data protected and you can use the data. And perhaps, you know, our political system is going to have to catch up. Do you think that's going to be a barrier in the U.S. and U.K.? A thousand percent, because most people imagine the unknown fears of what happens with the data more than what they get is collective benefit, whereas the collective benefit is massive and the unknown fears are rare. Mm-hmm. Yep. So actually, in fact, everyone, which I presume you did, should actually saw that kind of thing because, like, for example, whether it's cancer or anything else, we're going to get a massive benefit from the collective.

5:40Now, what the regulation needs to be is not you can't use the data. The regulation has to be that you have to do appropriate care to keep, you know, Aria's safety and sanctity, you know, kind of healthy, where it can't bleed out information to other places where she might get discriminated against in her workplace. Think about how much we could accelerate everybody's health and cure. If we could just take all of current health data and upload it all and just use it right now, we would be so much better off, all of us. And the only thing that really stops it, in addition to just general regulation, is like there are some areas where you say, OK, we have to think through and make sure that we don't do damage to individuals as we do this.

6:22But I think that's actually relatively straightforward. I mean, like, for example, I would have no worries, not just because I'm on the Microsoft board, but I would have no worries about signing that because I know that all of these major players treat the data stuff very, very seriously indeed. And so, like, I got asked this question at a couple events when I was doing the super agency book tour in London, was that, well, should I trust the data that I'm putting into ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude? And the answer is most of the time when you do a paid account, you have a contract and it's managed and safe and all the rest.

6:54But it's also these companies know that their ongoing value is by maintaining brand safety with you. They have a massive economic incentive for that. That doesn't mean that they can't fuck up just like anything can fuck up. Your doctor can fuck up, you know, but they have a massive incentive for that. And so I think generally speaking, we want to go very fast down this path But we do want to, you know, kind of like watch for specific considerations. And that's, as you know, the entire super agency thing. All right. So switching gears a little bit, thinking about no matter what the new technology is or what the new thing VCs are investing in, you're always going to have some people saying it's a bubble and some people saying it's amazing.

7:36So recently, Alibaba chairman Joe Say, he said, I'm still astounded by the type of numbers that are being thrown around in the U.S. about investing in AI. People are taking literally talking about$500 billion. And I don't think that's entirely necessary. I think in a way people are investing ahead of the demand that they're seeing today, but that they're projecting much bigger demand that ostensibly isn't here yet. And then on the other side, you have the NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, and he just announced a new chip, the forthcoming Rubin GPU. And it offers 3.3 times more power than its predecessor.

8:13And so he is predicting an inflection point where the world would see an 100-fold increase in computing demand due to the advancements in agentic AI systems. I don't necessarily think those are in conflict. It's sort of when the demand will come. But where do you stand on this in terms of are we going to be using this forthcoming, you know, compute that's coming from these chips? Or is the demand just not there yet? Well, obviously I would have been voting wrong on the Microsoft board if I was not voting for that there will be massive demand. Now, part of the whole question of navigating this is you can be a little wrong.

8:50You don't want to be massively wrong projecting demand because otherwise it can be very expensive in this cycle. So roughly speaking, you want to be potentially months wrong, not years wrong. So like if you're 10 months wrong, no problem. 10 years wrong, big problem. But I think that because you look at this and you say, hey, if you can actually add intelligence, like we were just talking about, you can add intelligence to research and analysis. You can add intelligence to navigation. You can add intelligence to education. You can add intelligence to navigating legal things. You can add intelligence to like literally everything.

9:25Then the presumption is, which I think is very smart, is that we have the same kind of market demand for it that we do for electricity at a certain price. We have infinite demand for it. Yep. Right. And it's just like, for example, as electricity maintains cheap or anything else, we do more air conditioning, we do more heating, we do more like all these other things. And that's part of the reason why it's very important that the energy be green, because we want to factor that in to getting the energy price. But like with green energy, make it as cheap as possible because there's infinite demand for it.

9:58I think that same infinite demand is going to apply to intelligence. So as you said, they can both be right. But I would be betting the way the U.S. tech sector is betting, which is this is going to be massively important. And getting there early and iterating really, really matters. The notion is we're first in a very slow thing because actually that AI adoption right now is slow. So part of what I'm trying to do in super agency, this podcast, is get that to be faster because I think that's useful in shaping it. You know, humanity enters the chat, you know, chapter one of super agency. And I think that's the thing we want to get to.

10:36But I think once it starts going fast, it'll also go fast. So it's kind of slow, then fast. And part of what will trigger, like, well, when fast and how, will be competitive things. So like if you're an engineer and you look over your shoulder and your fellow engineer, she's using co-pilot to suddenly code a whole lot faster and better. You go, oh shit, I should do that too. And then not just individuals, then groups and groups within companies. And then not just, you know, groups within companies, companies between companies. And then industries and individuals. It's like the, hey, I made a great thing for my dinner party because I consulted chat CVT on my recipe.

11:11And so anyway, that's the acceleration that we will see very, very soon. And there has been some demand. I mean, 100 million people are using ChatGPT, Anthropic. They do have billions of dollars in revenue. So, you know, there will be companies that fail. There always have. That's actually the great thing about, you know, technology and VC and companies. There's a lot of people trying things. And it's going to be really exciting to see what's successful. And what we're seeing right now is really an explosion in image generation. I mean, our internal Slack channel has just been, you know, popcorning with new images, new pictures of San Francisco.

11:47There is so much excitement coming because of the new launch from OpenAI. And, you know, Sam Altman just posted a quote. We think people will love it and we're excited to see the resulting creativity. Why are hyperscalers sprinting so hard on image generation in particular? Well, they're sprinting on a lot of things. I think image generation just happens to be a particular highlight of this month. And we highlighted future months and it was a highlight of past months. But it's like, you know, this month, image generation, next month, chain of thought reasoning, month after that, coding, maybe two months for that.

12:20Do you think it's just fun? Like, do you think one of the reasons is because people just like making pictures? Yeah, well, you know, pictures with a thousand words. And so, you know, you kind of get to the, hey, I can I can do deep research, but I can also create a picture. And, you know, I think it's also when, you know, with technologists, when they get a lot of feedback, like, for example, I think part of the update was, boy, it puts words very poorly in pictures, which, you know, you and I have experienced because we've tried to create images that would mean something for people and then put words in it because we are linguistic creatures.

12:50And the words come out of that. Not great thus far. Not great thus far. You know, part of what I think we'll see because of AI is a revolution in communication and images, not just in a in the words, but how do I use an image? It could be a picture to actually, in fact, help amplify and understand this point in efficient, emotive, connective and a way. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And I think that's, again, it's all of these areas and amplifying our expression and our speech for this. I love it. Reid, thank you so much. Always a joy to chat. Always a joy.

13:26Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schleid, Vanessa Handy, Aaliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno-Gimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayuda Sepieva, Thanasi Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relis.